GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A Grand Rapids woman has spent much of her free time sewing thousands of masks and this weekend, she’s donated hundreds of them to police and firefighters.

“I started doing this just to make them for family and friends that I knew were immune compromised or in the health care field,” said Nancy Husted. “And it’s just ballooned.”

Husted’s a retiree who found her niche during the pandemic, recently, sewing her 2,600th mask.

“If I can’t sleep at night, I’ll sit up at two o’clock in the morning and sew eight or 10 masks just to do something instead of sitting,” she said.

And once fabric stores reopened, she’s been keeping her machine busy with new ideas.

“Now that I can get in there, it’s always damaging because I usually spend a couple hundred bucks at a time,” Husted said. “Because I go, ‘Oh, this print’s cute! Oh, Star Wars! Oh, we got to get Star Wars!'”

And one of those ideas led her to the Grand Rapids Police Department, which gave her a shoutout for her donation of 300 masks.

“We do have PD in the family or law enforcement in the family,” she said. “You know, we’ve got people in health care in the family, so I just wanted to make sure to supply everybody that I can.”

This is her way of trying to put an end to the pandemic one thread at a time.

“Everybody’s got to pay forward. I mean, we all have to. It’s the only way this is going to go away,” Husted said.